Consumed: How Markets Corrupt Children, Infantilize Adults and Swallow Citizens Whole [Paperback]

 

 

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Most people - at least most people over 50 - know that there is something drastically wrong with the political, economic, and cultural environment of the developed world. In "Consumed" Barber offers an analysis of what has gone pear shaped. Former British Prime Minister, Edward Heath, may have spoken of the "unacceptable face of capitalism", but Barber goes further and argues that capitalism is now in its self-destruct phase which has severe negative impacts on civic and cultural life. The essence of Barber's argument is that the private sector no longer acts in the interests of the common good, and that the public or civic sector needs to be re-energised in order to act as a democratic brake on the excesses of privatisation. Indeed, Barber's devastating hatchet job on privatisation is remarkable considering that he is broadly sympathetic to capitalism per se. This latter fact may not endear him to those of a more leftist persuasion,and, although he is critical of present day consumer capitalism, he is,perhaps, too kind to the exploitation and inequality that capitalism has always generated.
The book is readable, with extensive documentation, and essential reading for cultural studies students, and, indeed, for anyone trying to obtain a better understanding of where we are and how we got there. Recommended.

`Consumed: how markets corrupt children, infantilize adults, and swallow citizens whole' is one of those portentous works of modern American sociology, sitting alongside Bloom's `The Closing of the American Mind' or Ritzer's `McDonaldization of Society'. It shares the broad, sometimes grumpy critique of the former, and coins new terms and overstates its case like the latter.

In brief, Barber is searching for an account of consumerism to replace Max Weber's `protestant work ethic', which described a capitalism that was restrained, dependable, forward-thinking, responsible and hard working. In capitalism's later days, all the needs have been met and yet it is still growing, and to account for its new phase Barber proposes an ethic of 'infantilization'.

By this, he means that children must be indoctrinated to consume, and adults must be prevented from growing up, by a pervasive `infantilization' of culture.

It is a thought-provoking idea, and helpfully expanded in chapters on branding, citizenship, creative protest and so on. It is insightful, but isn't as compelling as Barber thinks - he seems intent on both coining a phrase as lasting as his 'Jihad vs McWorld' construction, and on being seen as a sociologist on a par with Weber.

Those are both for history to judge. In the meantime this is a constructive, imaginative, and useful attempt to explain the state of our consumer culture.

Subtitled "How Markets Corrupt Children, Infantilize Adults and Swallow Citizens Whole", this is not intended for the dumbed-down consumer Barber holds to be victim of an overproducing capitalist system. The main argument - that through the use of infantilization, clever marketing folk have taken the concept of brand loyalty to a new level such that they don't simply capture their target and retain consumers from an early age, but that consumers are no longer expected or able to grow up to think for themselves - could have been confined to a shorter book but Barber has included a rich range of reference material to expand "Consumed" to address other issues besides. This pleases as much as it annoys.
Take privatization - yes, offering naming rights to academic buildings and over fellowships and chairs (as well as erecting giant ketchup bottles atop football stadia) to the highest bidder instead of accepting donations from grateful alumni is distasteful but this doesn't of itself impugn the purpose or integrity of what is being funded - Barber is himself Kekst Professor of Civil Society. And the devil's bargain made by some schools to force corporate donors' advertising on their students in return for financial support is at bottom a matter of choice and not forced upon them. His point is better made in describing examples of wholesale contracting out of public sector functions such as military security and interrogation.
Barber's observation that consumers are today persuaded to buy into an experience or lifestyle and that the product is incidental isn't new: barmen and hairdressers have known for many years how few customers visit for the drink or haircut. What is revealing is how modern marketing has reached the point of achieving "loyalty beyond reason" where brands are not merely desired or worshipped but positively loved: trademarks evolved into brands, the most successful of which have in turn become "lovemarks". But even Barber misses the point that McDonalds' "I'm lovin' it" is unintentionally Orwellian, as anyone familiar with the last four words of "Nineteen Eighty-Four" will recognise.
If our urges to consume are powered by emotions then marketing will achieve greater success as long as these emotions aren't subject to more adult forms of override, such as rational decision-making ("I don't really need/ can't actually afford that extra pair of shoes"). It is for this reason, argues Barber, that marketing has deliberately dumbed us down in order to ensure we as consumers will continue impetuously to absorb the wares of an overproducing capitalist economy: we prefer easy to hard, fast to slow and simple to complex and marketing exploits this mercilessly. Whereas much of what we experience as complex pleasure requires time, delivery points are designed around speed so that our purchase, information-gathering and eating actions are undertaken for purposes other than intrinsic pleasure, with consequential modern ills such as addictive shopping disorders, eating disorders, etc.
Resistance from consumers themselves, says Barber, may come from creolization (adopt and replace), carnivalization (celebrate its liberating effect) or jamming (redirection and subversion), but none of these is compelling. More disturbing, but unexplored, is the impact markets are not having on societies unable to afford what the first world is overproducing in their third world back yards. Barber begins "Consumed" by contrasting the exploitation, starvation, prostitution and impression of poor children into military service with the first world's marketing mission for eternal childishness, but could usefully have considered among his conclusions the extent to which the harder, slower and more complex lessons of the former might eventually overcome the easier, faster and simpler consequences of the latter.

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